What It Feels Like to Smash Your Bathroom Scale

By Rebecca Pacheco

Last week, I smashed my bathroom scale. It was an accident. But it was also kind of spectacular: like performance art or therapy, or both.

The timing seemed appropriate as we are now poised to reenter society. You may have noticed that the diet industry, sometimes known as the wellness industrial complex — and, let’s be frank, the patriarchy — is chomping at the opportunity to weigh in on our size and self-worth, which have a pernicious relationship according to conventional beauty standards. Smaller equates to greater worthiness; bigger, less.

This has always been the myth and business model: to sell future selves that don’t necessarily align with health or happiness — as long as we buy products and apps and supplements and meal plans and cleanses and devices — all with the implication that we need to take up less space. Genuine health and well-being are mostly moot. As far as the diet industry is concerned, contentment is often averse to commercial interest. To sell something, we must believe it fills a void, even if that void is manufactured by the seller.

I understand this as a woman in the modern world, who learned devastatingly early how fraught the relationship can be between size and desirability, food and feeling at home in our own bodies. Coming of age in the 1990s, heroin chic was the runway look and food labels promoted fat-free, low-fat, and nonfat. My family being in the restaurant business complicated things. Food was our livelihood; it was a celebration; it was art even; and yet, it was painfully clear that I should not eat it too indulgently, voraciously, or guiltlessly. Come to think of it, “guilt-free,” was yet another label.

Furthermore, I’ve been in the wellness field for most of my career. I’ve been the cheerful face (and occasionally headless body) in ad campaigns for international athletic brands, in yoga videos and DVDs for glossy magazines, and my social media feed. Feed. I have never paused to consider the irony of that word in this context. Lately, your feed may be telling you to go on a fast. Mine is!

If you are reading this, you survived a time in history characterized by illness, loss, death, and isolation. Leaving our homes was dangerous. For more than a year, we sheltered in place, often moving less and sometimes eating more — if we were lucky enough to have full fridges and freezers and cupboards and hidden stashes (even from our spouses) of the good chocolate.

At the time of writing, one in five American households with school-age children is food insecure. The longer I inhabit this planet, the easier it is to see through the fever dream of the wellness machine, how it can be little more than capitalism in yoga pants. New look, same old power structures and biases.

In quarantine, we ate for sustenance, comfort, and entertainment. We ate because it was a vestige of life we recognized. We cooked meals, which recurred at maddening intervals, and washed the ceaseless pile of dishes. We laundered and folded, and then protested the laundering and folding. Our legs took us for long walks or labored runs or trips to the grocery store, which constituted our entire social calendar, like a Bridgerton girl being introduced to society. I have come for radishes, your grace.

We did our best to sit up straight and look attentive, not frantic or terrified in Zoom meetings. We fashioned smiley faces out of — not necessarily our faces — but banana slices for the child’s breakfast. We slathered butter or jam or honey on toast. We mashed, chopped, and kneaded. Our bodies needed to stay alive, and they did.

According to a study conducted by the American Psychological Association, Americans have gained an average of twenty-nine pounds since last March, with the median being fifteen pounds, which occasioned the inevitable quip “quarantine-fifteen.” One study suggested bodies in lockdown gained as much as half a pound every ten days.

This has always been the myth and business model: to sell future selves that don’t necessarily align with health or happiness.

I was drinking water one morning when I placed the glass on the edge of the sink, but it slid off the counter and crashed onto the scale. The drinking glass remained intact. Meanwhile, the scale shattered into a pile of crusted, glittering glass. A masterpiece, truly.

My daughter lifted her head from her pillow in her room across the hall — rosy cheeks and hair disheveled from sleep— and asked, “Is there glass everywhere?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Can I see?” she asked, excitedly.

Never has waking up for preschool gone so smoothly. She bolted from bed to assess the damage.

Tempered glass is a marvel. You can stand on it. You can drive down the highway at eighty miles per hour following a gravel truck, and a small piece of debris may fly off and hit your windshield. The vast majority of the time, it will remain intact. When tempered glass breaks, it’s designed to explode into tiny pieces like rock salt rather than split into dangerous shards.

Similarly, once the spell of our diet mania is broken, it’s impossible not to see its injurious remnants everywhere. My spell broke when I was pregnant with my daughter. Something utterly bonkers happens when you’re pregnant: people feel entitled to your body. People who have given birth, people who have never given birth, male, female — they advise, size you up, blithely ask questions about your medical history or birth plan, wax on about their wife’s postpartum breast size at your place of work (true story). They might even call you fat — newsflash: pregnancy does not succeed without the critical, life-giving element of fat. I could go on.

Surely you could insert your own story here. Presumably, these same folks would be put off if you commented on their weight or probed for the medical details of, say, a recent colonoscopy? Before pregnancy, I experienced plenty of subtle and conspicuous paternalism, but carrying a daughter made me unblinking in my perception. I saw and processed all of it differently. I do not want my daughter’s beautiful, formative brain corrupted by the exhaustive and reductive tedium of obliging the male gaze, the tyranny of body image, and the myths we are fed about womanhood and self-worth.

The shattered scale reminded me of a conversation I had with a dear friend a few years ago about breaking things. It was before the pandemic, but not the ignominy of having a mascot of misogyny in the White House. We were haunted and terrified but not yet aware of the scope and scale of our trauma. You can tell when a conversation strikes this cord between mothers; the words stop and the eyes betray a feeling of collective dread about the world our children will inherit.

“My friend goes into the woods and breaks plates,” she told me.

We were on a library lawn on a summer day. Around us, kids played and shrieked with delight. I was drinking a cup of tea, which I almost snorted out my nostrils with laughter.

“That sounds amazing. Where?”

The longer I inhabit this planet, the easier it is to see through the fever dream of the wellness machine, how it can be little more than capitalism in yoga pants. New look, same old power structures and biases.

“I’m not sure. They’re called Sacred Rage Workshops,” she said.

Perhaps the scale was my unintentional, improvised version.

Some of us will shed the weight we gained in quarantine. Some won’t. This is not a judgment, just the evergreen data on dieting. It’s time, both individually and collectively, for us to stop conflating health and thinness. They are not the same. The former is life-affirming. The latter is too often wielded to control women.

I’m not saying you should or should not lose weight. That is not my business or anyone else’s. I’m saying that our metrics were always flawed. I’m saying that a mother’s body doesn’t need to “bounce back,” only to heal. I’m saying that our bodies — which built other bodies and fed and bathed and soothed them, which plied the young bodies with snacks through remote school and were their primary playmate/teacher/cook/nurse/art therapist/music teacher/pillow-fort architect, to name a few — do not need to subscribe to the trendy diets of cavemen or starvation.

Start with the basics. Have you had a tall glass of cold water lately? Have you fed yourself a good meal, as you would your beloved daughter or son? Can you give yourself some rest? Can you go out for a walk so that your legs and eyes and mind may wander?

This resilient, ferocious, exhausted, inextinguishable, luminous, weathered, political, intimate, intuitive body, I only recommend that you love it. As we start to move more freely now, perhaps in ways that get our blood pumping and heart beating, may we be unperturbed by the forces committed to telling us how to look.

I need to admit to being the unwitting evangelist of a radical new post-pandemic crash diet. Perhaps I should say smash?

Technically, it was an accident, but it tasted delicious.

Rebecca Pacheco is the author of Still Life: The Myths and Magic of Mindful Living and Do Your Om Thing: Bending Yoga Tradition to Fit Your Modern Life. She lives in Boston with her family, where she writes and teaches. You can follow her @omgal.

At the time of writing, she does not own a scale.